Itemize Books During The Day of St. Anthony's Fire

Original Title: The Day of St. Anthony's Fire
Edition Language: English
Setting: France Pont-Saint-Esprit,1951(France)
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The Day of St. Anthony's Fire Hardcover | Pages: 310 pages
Rating: 4.2 | 114 Users | 23 Reviews

Particularize Regarding Books The Day of St. Anthony's Fire

Title:The Day of St. Anthony's Fire
Author:John G. Fuller
Book Format:Hardcover
Book Edition:Deluxe Edition
Pages:Pages: 310 pages
Published:1968 by Macmillan Company (NY)
Categories:History. Nonfiction. Medical. Health. Medicine

Commentary As Books The Day of St. Anthony's Fire

This is the strange, true, almost incredible story of a small French village where in '51 hundreds of townspeople went mad on a single night. Many of the most highly regarded citizens leaped from windows or jumped into the Rhone, screaming that their heads were made of copper, their bodies wrapped in snakes, their limbs swollen to gigantic size or shrunken to tiny appendages. Others ran through the streets, claiming to be chased by "bandits with donkey ears", by tigers, lions & other terrifying apparitions. Animals went berserk. Dogs ripped bark from trees until their teeth fell out. Cats dragged themselves along the floor in grotesque contortions. Ducks strutted like penguins. Villagers & animals died right & left.
Bit by bit, the story behind the tragedy in Pont-St-Esprit--a tiny Provencial village of twisted streets that looks much today as it did in the Middle Ages--unfolded to doctors & toxcologists. That story, one of the most bizarre in modern medical history, is movingly recounted in The Day of St. Anthony's Fire.
Throughout the Middle Ages & during other times in history, similar hallucinatory outbreaks occurred. They were called St. Anthony's Fire because it was believed that only prayers to the saint could hold the disease in check.
Even modern medicine could find no way to check the disease. Drugs failed to bring even temporary relief. Hundreds in the village suffered for weeks, with total agonizing insomnia, never knowing when they might once more suddenly go berserk.
The cause of St. Anthony's Fire was known since early history to be ergot, a mold found on rye grain that at rare times inexplicably became posionous enough to create monstrous hallucinations & death. In '51 little significance was attached to the fact that the base of ergot was lysergic acid, also the base for LSD, a drug just coming to the attention of scientists at the time--a drug so powerful that one eye-dropperful could cause as many as 5000 people to hallucinate for hours. At this point, the story becomes a vividly absorbing medical detective story demonstrating the possibility that a strange, spontaneous form of LSD might have caused the human tragedy that came to the hapless villagers of Pont-St-Esprit.

Rating Regarding Books The Day of St. Anthony's Fire
Ratings: 4.2 From 114 Users | 23 Reviews

Comment On Regarding Books The Day of St. Anthony's Fire
Fascinating until it reaches the point of minutia in the analysis of what went wrong. Then it becomes just tedious and unreadable.

Having read some of Fuller's books, I picked this one up at the sale table of the Amarynth Bookstore in Evanston, Illinois during a break from work.The story is basically this: In 1951 a rural region of France was inflicted with mass insanity. A medical investigation followed and it was discovered that the region depended on rye flour for its breads. The flour had become wet, gone moldy and produced the argot lysergic acid which caused the symptoms. Unlike its derivative LSD, however, rye mold

This book is the true account of how in 1951 the people of a French village were driven mad by ergot-infected bread, but it is mostly about the maddening bureaucracy and legal processes by which the victims suffered before reaching a financial settlement. Thus, while the book might seem to be about the most interesting topic in the history of the world, the author chose to focus more on the less interesting machinations of the French Millers' Union and Health Department. It is like a GODZILLA

The fascinating story of a village gone mad. Also the only good book John G Fuller ever wrote.I read this and loved it, then went looking for more from the author. Everything else seemed to be the trashiest sort of UFO / ghost story disguised as reportage.It seriously made me reconsider this novel, which I had believed to be essentially historical. Based on the rest of his work, you at least have to be skeptical.In spite of all that, it's in my top twenty.

Absolutely fascinating story about the devastating effects that Ergot poisoning had in the small French village of Pont-Saint-Espirit in 1951. I read this as a teenager and strongly believe that the maddening effects of this natural LSD fueled my entirely irrational fear of zombies.

I am re-reading this book. This is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. Fuller tells of an event that seems like it is coming from the dark ages, but happened just before I was born in 1951 in France. This is not a very remote event, yet it seems like it is very remote, since it is nearly incomprehensible that an event like this could even happen in modern times.The writing method is nonfiction yet in a riveting manner. I was never bored for one second when I read this book the

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